cup in the Lord's Supper to the laity, the injunction of celibacy upon the clergy, the abuses of the mass, auricular confession, and absolution; traditional observances, monastic vows, and ecclesiastical authority.

Meanwhile the Swiss Reformers, denied a hearing at Augsburg, were actively inculcating their yet wider and more spiritual belief. Zwingli was pre-eminently a man in advance of his age. Without reserve he held the absolute and exclusive authority of Scripture in Christian faith and practice, rejecting Church tradition far more decidedly than Luther and Melanchthon had done. To him the Sacraments were but symbols and seals of spiritual gifts, which might, however, be imparted without them. Thus baptism might be without true regeneration, and there might be true regeneration without Baptism. Infant baptism he approved; but unbaptized infants dying would be saved. The belief, in which the Romish Church had followed the teaching of Augustine, that such infants would be excluded from heaven, he utterly repudiated, reconciling their certain salvation with his doctrine of Election, on the

ground that such infants also were among the elect. To the elect the upright among the heathen likewise belonged, as he for the first time boldly declared; and 'the fate of Socrates and Seneca,' he said, 'is no doubt better than that of many Popes.' In the Lord's Supper there was no communication of our Lord's body in any physical or literal sense. Bread and wine remained bread and wine; the Transubstantiation of Rome and the Consubstantiation of Luther were equally denied. The Eucharist, therefore, was a simple festival of commemoration. Such views, alarming to the Lutherans, and scorned by the Papists, were the precursors of all that is most spiritual in the Creeds of modern times; and when Zwingli passed away, slain in battle (1531), at the early age of forty-seven, he had initiated a Reformation of which perhaps the end is not even yet. greater successor was John Calvin, a young man of twenty-two when Zwingli fell; a year later he espoused the cause of the Reformed faith, to which his career henceforth belongs.

His

The two divisions of the Protestant community were now known by different names, the Lutherans,

or adherents of the Augsburg Confession, being termed the Evangelical Church, the Zwinglians, the Reformed. These latter, for a time, had no Confession corresponding to that of Augsburg, although the Conclusions of Berne in 1528, and the Confession of the Four Cities, with Zwingli's letter to the Emperor, have already been mentioned. At Basle also, in the year following the Augsburg Diet, a brief Confession was prepared by Ecolampadius and afterwards published by his successor Myconius, also a friend of Zwingli, in which his doctrines are reaffirmed, with the very noteworthy addition, not always found in dogmatic Creeds: 'We submit this our Confession to the judgment of the Holy Scriptures, and hold ourselves ready always thankfully to obey God and His Word, if we should be corrected out of the said Holy Scriptures.' This Confession, however, like that of Berne in 1528, was chiefly local in its use; and it was not until 1536, five years after Zwingli's death, that the first great Confession of the whole Reformed Church was issued from Basle. In that year also Calvin's famous work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, in substance a Commentary on the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds,

was published, the author being but twenty-seven years of age. In the Confession itself (Confessio Helvetica Prior) he probably had no hand, it having been prepared by Bullinger, Myconius, and other disciples of Zwingli. It reiterates his wellknown doctrines, but lays greater emphasis than he had done upon the value of the Sacraments. Unexpectedly this Confession gained the approval of Luther, and it seemed for a time as if the Evangelical and Reformed branches were to become united. But this was not to be. The most distinctive feature of this Confession, and of its more elaborate successor, the Second Helvetic Formula, issued from Zurich thirty years later, was the prominence given to Holy Scripture. The Augsburg Confession had stated in its preface that it is drawn from the Scriptures and the pure Word of God, but makes no further mention of the Bible. In the Swiss Confessions, on the other hand, we find the Bible in the foreground. The first five articles out of the twenty-eight in the former are devoted to the assertion of the authority of Scripture, with the repudiation of all human tradition. The second Article affirms that 'these Scriptures, holy and divine, are not to be inter

preted and expounded otherwise than from themselves through the rule (literally, plumbline) of faith and love.'

In the same year, 1536, Calvin prepared a Catechism, based upon his Institutes, under the title of The Catechism of the Church of Geneva, and containing a short Confession of Faith, which was to be binding upon all the citizens. For a time this Catechism, first written in French, and afterwards translated into several other languages, had very considerable currency. It was, however, never formally adopted by the Reformed Churches as a symbol of their faith, being superseded, as we shall see, by others; although in Scotland the First Book of Discipline, 1560, directs it to be taught to children as 'the most perfect that ever yet was used in the Kirk.' The first answers of this Catechism are interesting, as a suggestion of what we afterwards find in that of the Westminster Assembly.

'What,' asks Calvin, is the chief end of human life?'

'That men may know God, by whom they were created.'

'For what reason dost thou say this?'